Two days, three hours, ten minutes.
The lei? Urn, they’d left the clubhouse about one-thirty. Allow an hour and a quarter, say, for the first thirteen holes, and, well, say between two-thirty and three. Strike an average at two forty-five. That would be pretty close. Subtract it.
Two days, three hours, ten minutes.
Periodicity.
He subtracted the next one first-the fourth episode should have happened at five fifty-five on Monday. If—
Yes, it had been exactly five minutes of six when he’d walked through the door of the jewelry shop and been anesthetized.
Exactly.
Two days, three hours, ten minutes.
Periodicity.
PERIODICITY.
A connection, at last. Proof that the screwy events were all of a piece. Every…uh…fifty-one hours and ten minutes something screwy happened.
But why?
He stuck his head out in the hallway.
“Nurse. NURSE. What time is it?” `
“Half past eight, Mr. Wills. Anything I can bring you?”
Yes. No. Champagne. Or a strait jacket. Which?
He’d solved the problem. But the answer didn’t make any more sense than the problem itself. Less, maybe. And today—
He figured quickly.
In thirty-five minutes.
Something would happen to him in thirty-five minutes!
Something like a flying angleworm or like a quacking duck suffocating in an air-tight showcase, or—
Or maybe something dangerous again? Burning heat, sudden anesthesia—
Maybe something worse?
A cobra, unicorn, devil, werewolf, vampire, unnameable monster?
At nine-five. In half an hour.
In a sudden draft from the open window, his forehead felt cold. Because it was wet with sweat.
In half an hour.
What?
PACE; up and down, four steps one way, four steps back. Think, think, THINK.
You’ve solved part of it; what’s the rest? Get it, or it will get you.
Periodicity; that’s part of it. Every two days, three hours, ten minutes
Something happens.
Why?
What?
How?
They’re connected, those things, they are part of a pattern and they make sense somehow or they wouldn’t be spaced an exact interval of time apart.
Connect: angleworm, heat, duck, lei, ether—Or go mad.
Mad. Mad. MAD.
Connect: Ducks cat angleworms, or do they? Heat is necessary to grow flowers to make leis. Angleworms might eat flowers for all he knew but what have they to do with leis, and what is ether to a duck? Duck is animal, lei is vegetable, heat is vibration, ether is gas, worm is… what the hell’s a worm? And why a worm that flies? And why was the duck in the showcase? What about the missing Chinese coin with the hole? Do you add or subtract the golf ball, and if you let x equal a halo and y equal one wing, then x plus 2y plus 1 angle-worm equals—
Outside, somewhere, a clock striking in the gathering darkness.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine-Nine o’clock.
Five minutes to go.
In five minutes, something was going to happen again. Cobra, unicorn, devil, werewolf, vampire. Or something cold and slimy and without a name.
Anything.
Pace up and down, four steps one way, four steps back.
Think, THINK.
Jane forever lost. Dearest Jane, in whose arms was all of happiness. Jane, darling, I’m not mad, I’m WORSE than mad. I’m—
WHAT TIME IS IT?
It must he two minutes after nine. Three.
What’s coming? Cobra, devil, werewolf
What will it be this time?
At five minutes after nine-WHAT?
Must be four after now; yes, it had been at least four minutes, maybe four and a half
He yelled, suddenly. He couldn’t stand the waiting. It couldn’t be solved. But he had to solve it. Or go mad.
MAD.
He must be mad already. Mad to tolerate living, trying to fight something you couldn’t fight, trying to beat the unbeatable. Beating his head against—
He was running now, out the door, down the corridor.
Maybe if he hurried, be could kill himself before five minutes after nine. He’d never have to know. Die, DIE AND GET IT OVER WITH. THAT’S THE ONLY WAY TO BUCK THIS GAME.
Knife.
There’d be a knife somewhere. A scalpel is a knife. Down the corridor. Voice of a nurse behind hum, shouting. Footsteps.
Run. Where? Anywhere.
Less than a minute left. Maybe seconds.
Maybe it’s nine-five now. Hurry!
Door marked “Utility”-he jerked it open.
Shelves of linen. Mops and brooms. You can’t kill yourself with a mop or broom. You can smother yourself with linen, but not in less than a minute and probably with doctors and interns coming.
Uniforms. Bucket. Kick the bucket, but how? Ah. There on the upper shelf—
A cardboard carton, already opened, marked “Lye.”
Painfuclass="underline" Sure, but it wouldn’t last long. Get it over with. The box in his hand, the opened corner, and tilted the contents into his mouth.
But it was not a white, searing powder. All that had come out of the cardboard carton was a small copper coin. He took it out of his mouth and held it, and looked at it with dazed eves.
It was five minutes after nine, then; out of the box of lye had come a small foreign copper coin. No, it wasn’t the Chinese haikwan tael that had disappeared from the showcase in the museum, because that was silver and had a hole in it. And the lettering on this wasn’t Chinese. If he remembered his coins, it looked Rumanian.
And then strong hands took hold of Charlie’s arms and led him back to his room and somebody talked to him quietly for a long time.
And he slept.
HE AWOKE Thursday morning from a dreamless sleep, and felt strangely refreshed and, oddly, quite cheerful.
Probably because, in that awful thirty-five minutes of waiting he’d experienced the evening before, he’d hit rock bottom. And bounced.
A psychiatrist might have explained it by saying that he had, under stress of great emotion, suffered a temporary lesion and gone into a quasi-state of maniac-depressive insanity. Psychiatrists like to make simple things complicated.
The fact was that the poor guy had gone off his rocker for a few minutes.
And the absurd anticlimax of that small copper coin had been the turning point. Look for something horrible, unnameable—and get a small copper coin. Practically a prophylactic treatment, if you’ve got enough stuff in you to laugh.
And Charlie had laughed last night. Probably that was why his room this morning seemed to be a different room. The window was in a different wall, and it had bars across it. Psychiatrists often misinterpret a sense of humor.
But this morning he felt cheerful enough to overlook the implications of the barred windows. Here it was a bright new day with the sun streaming through the bars, and it was another day and he was still alive and had another chance.
Best of all, he knew he wasn’t insane.
Unless—
He looked and there were his clothes hanging over the hack of a chair and he sat up and put his legs out of bed, and reached for his coat pocket to see if the coin was still where he’d put it when they’d grabbed him.
It was.
Then—
He dressed slowly, thoughtfully.
Now, in the light of morning, it came to him that the thing could he solved. Six-now there were six-screwy things, but they were definitely connected. Periodicity proved it.